Month: December 2017

Near the “turn of the New Year” I am looking over the developments that I have accomplished in 2017 in order to find profitability and profit for my small business. One speaks about Return on Investment or “ROI” a lot in Information Technology but the Business Strategy used to obtain that dollar reward is less discussed. But the moment you purchase a new technologic device, be it a mobile phone or a toaster you should be thinking about how you are going to earn your dollars back and more!

I wrote about and worked on x86 opcode embedded computers a lot during the year. But looking on YouTube and in the Jameco catalog I see that the Zilog Z80 and even the Motorola line-up of chipsets is a lot more popular in today’s Retro Computing Market.

I once even built a small board computer using the Zilog Z80A.

But “back in a different day” we all spoke about the IBM PC and how Microsoft took over from IBM, and the heyday of the Personal Computer began. This was our lore and if as technical professionals we had some of the facts wrong we still had enough background information to get started out here in the small computer economy.

You would have to be an English Literature major to compare the different stories, a.k.a, Product Histories, that are used to describe where we in today’s Internet of Things (IoT) space.

In fact, I am. Drum Roll Please!

We must evaluate why we have made the strategic business and technology decisions that we, as a culture have made.

But is this the best way to think about this material?

Should we instead determine our choice of Central Processing Unit (CPU) – an term that at once encompasses today’s Microprocessors (MPU) and MicroControllers (MCU) and GPUs and APUs by an actual metric rather than a User Acceptance cum. Business Success Story?